Thoughts

Last Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a beta version of WebMatrix, a free tool complementing the Web Platform, aimed at simplifying development of ASP.NET web applications.

Microsoft, previously bogged down (in my opinion) by the likes of MS Frontpage and the complex 1st version of Visual Studio, has gained much progression in it's web offerings, giving developers quite a respectable amount of tools (which are also easy to use) in recent years.

First impression

At the first glance, WebMatrix really feels the Windows 7 bundled Wordpad, with web/code development features. However,  familiarity and simplicity is definitely in line with ...

Google recently released a little gem, called GoogleCL, a python-bsaed, command-line interface (CLI) for it's data APIs.

About the Tool

From the Google Open Source blog,

GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.

Although it's more targeted at power users, I feel that non-power users or non-programming oriented users should not dismiss this CLI tool.

In my personal opinion, although Google does have excellent interfaces for their services, using this tool would make ...

Having a day job as well as going to full-time studies seriously takes up a lot of time. It doesn't help that technology moves at an astounding pace.

With the release of WordPress 3.0 (And in the midst of my exams!), I'll have to review my plugins as well... So I guess a list of to-dos is in order...

1. URL Shortener Plugin
   • Update FTShorten Core (It's been in incubation since January...)
   • Plugin to take into account the new filters in WP3.0
   • Test Javascript mutli-administration and editor integration
   • Re-write own service and functions
2. Establish OAuth support ...

It may be the holidays, but the time has come to show (or regurgitate) what we have learned, back to the tiny scripts of paper which would determine a small letter reflected in an all powerful paper at the end of 4 years.

We're aided with the knowledge from a series of lectures in 6 weeks (which covered content meant for 18 weeks), and also armed with interpretation skills honed over the years to overcome traps which are well camouflaged with words and phrases.

Yup. I trust that we'll do well.

Twitter is over capacity yet again.

Screenshot taken 10/06/2010 0036hrs GMT+8

I attended Day 1 of the WebCamps^#1 (4th June), and am quite impressed by Visual Studio (VS) 2010's features and quite keen to start trying out ASP.net MVC2 "programming methodology".

I must admit, I once kept away from the suite mainly due to the non-semantic (and bloated) HTML markup generation. Now that it's been vastly improved, coupled with the focus on MVC (Model-View-Controller) all wrapped in an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), it is probably time to re-visit it.

Furthermore, as a strong opensource supporter, hearing that Microsoft embraced jQuery and packaged it in VS2010 was quite ...

Hello World! Yup. This would be the first post on my new blog, running on Google's App Engine framework.

As I've never written a Python application, it took a little longer to get my ideas out. Although there are many existing blog apps out there, I guess the best way to learn is to actually code it yourself. So after about a month, I'm finally satisfied enough to launch this new site, powered by my application: BlogAengin.

Old posts will still work as I did incorporate support for old articles. They can be accessed via the Legacy ...